Fire Rant

        Over the past few weeks there has been a fire burning through the Lake Tahoe area. The fire came extremely close to my family’s house. I was reading news reports and one had an interview with someone that lived only a few streets away talking about how he could hear the fire coming. Well I figure the house is gone and I call my dad to let him know that all that work he did rebuilding the house would be gone but on the bright side he could correct those things he felt he never got right. My dad being the ball like he is was already looking through magazines of prebuilt log cabin homes that can be delivered. Let to the real reason of this rant......Google.

        Google you say...bah, they didn’t start the fire. True. However in tried to ascertain where the fire was and if I still had a place to visit in the winter I fired up Google Earth and Google Maps. Either one showed the burn area or the fire. That’s OK I thought, maybe they will update their stuff over night so I check the next morning, nada. In fact I have checked every day and still no updated images. Here we have a great tool to ascertaining the damage of natural disasters and it is not used. Instead I had to sit on hold for hours on the emergency damage line that had been set up for people who were out of town and needed to check to see if their houses had burned down.

        Now satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) have a period of up to 4 hours. Even if the satellite was further out, there is really no reason that in a 24 hour period google couldn’t have gotten updated images for the area. Actually the way Google Earth works, Google didn’t need updated images, California State Government could have hosted the updated imagery and all they had to do was publish a url that Google Earth could use to get images for that area. The vehicles are already in space taking pictures so why would it be so difficult to get them out in times of natural disasters? Even if the IC was afraid to show pictures, they could degrade the images to they looked like the other stuff used by Google. I just keep hoping that someday the 21st century will really arrive (Damn kids and their packets networks....)